Cam's Fortune

by Odessa Lynne

  These people weren’t wealthy criminals. The wealthy could still afford all the technology and corrective surgeries everyone had taken for granted before the wolves came. That meant they probably weren’t connected to the—

  Ah fuck. What was he thinking? Of course they were connected to the renegades in the area. If they weren’t, why would any of them have any idea who Cam Lujan was?

  “You want money?” Cam asked. “If you know I’m Lujan, you know I can get you some money if you let me go.” He eyed Liam. “I’m in the middle of something big here. You’re all getting in my way.”

  Loud-mouthed motherfucker couldn’t seem to stay out of the conversation, even though Cam clearly hadn’t been addressing him. “That so?” he asked.

  “Shut up, Marlon,” Liam’s defender said.

  “You shut up, dick-face.”

  “Shut up, Marlon!” Cammy said.

  Liam just stood there and watched the others, while Cam watched him.

  “Did you kill the wolf?” Cam asked Liam. There was no one else he cared to hear from. Liam was in charge whether loud-mouth recognized that fact or not.

  That quieted the room. Liam stepped in front of Cammy, his eyes locking on Cam. “What does it matter to you if we did—if you are, in fact, Lujan?”

  “It matters because I was trying to get something out of him.” Sell the lie. Sell the lie. He kept his gaze steady on Liam while Liam watched Cam with a great deal more discernment than Cam liked.

  Liam started tapping his fingers against the side of his thigh, a thoughtful gesture as he continued to watch Cam. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Cam sat up straighter, flicking his gaze upward, away from those fingers. Liam shifted his weight and moved his hand to his belt. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Cam gritted his teeth.

  If he wasn’t mistaken, and he had no reason to think he was, either Liam was sending him a signal or Liam was trying to catch him in a trap.

  Cam had about two seconds to decide how to respond, and the wrong choice would probably get him killed.

  Chapter 8

  “You sorry motherfucker,” Cam said, keeping his voice low. The washroom in the old house had a big sink and a long cabinet and Cam had hitched his hip up against the counter and crossed his arms. He’d had to suck in his breath to do it—the knife wound was more tender than ever after Marlon’s attempts to put his boot through Cam’s midsection earlier.

  In fact, he wasn’t all that sure he’d be standing if he wasn’t propped up against the counter. He’d almost fallen in the bathroom during the five minutes Liam had given him to wash up and change. Cam wasn’t sure what had happened to his own clothes, but what Liam had offered him barely fit. He was still in the sweatpants, but he’d dropped the flannel shirt in favor of a t-shirt that bulged at the seams over his shoulders and arms. Still, even that was better than the too-short, too-tight long sleeves of the flannel.

  Liam stood in front of Cam and his nondescript buddy had taken up a position against the washroom’s narrow door, his head turned so his ear was pressed very nearly against the peeling white paint covering the wood.

  “You owe me,” Liam said. “I just saved your life.”

  “I don’t owe you shit,” Cam said. He rolled his shoulders. His legs were weak and his stomach hurt, and that didn’t even touch on how uncomfortable it was to breathe. “How’d you recognize me? Why don’t I know you?” His voice came out a hell of a lot calmer than he felt inside, but he didn’t need to raise his voice to get his point across. He figured he was doing a damn fine job of it with his eyes.

  Liam shrugged and glanced at his companion. “That’s not important. What I want is that money. Eighteen thousand gold ten-dollars. Fresh cards. Non-traceable.”

  “That money belongs to me. I’m not giving it up just to keep you from outing me to these assholes.”

  “Of course you will.”

  Cam narrowed his eyes. “You think so?”

  “You get me that money and I won’t let it slip that I spotted you nearly two hundred miles south of where you’re supposed to be.”

  Cam mashed his lips together tightly. He already knew he’d be fucked if that got out to the right people inside the organization.

  “It’s for a good cause,” Liam added.

  “Your superiors find out you’re skimming and they’ll put your head in a noose same as mine.”

  Liam grinned and glanced at his companion again. The guy pushed his eyeglasses more firmly onto his nose and shrugged with one shoulder.

  So now Cam knew who was really in charge.

  Cam jerked his head toward the guy. “Who is he?”

  “Just call him Eli,” Liam said.

  Eli raised his eyebrows but didn’t say a word.

  Cam watched him for another moment before returning his attention to Liam. He sure wasn’t going to get anything out of Eli right then. “What’s this good cause?”

  “Someone’s promising to deliver a special shipment of bullets to us for the right price.”

  Cam’s stomach tightened. He hadn’t thought much about the stuff he’d learned during the ambush and subsequent revealing conversation between his ambusher Jay and Trevor/Matthew. They’d mentioned bullets. Matthew had thought Cam had something to do with them, but Cam hadn’t known what the hell Matthew was talking about.

  “What kind of bullets?”

  “No one will say. I had to make a lot of promises to get the shipment that’s coming, led a few people to believe I have access to a lot of money, but after one thing or another, all my options have fallen through. You’re the solution to a really tough problem I’ve been facing these last two weeks.”

  Cam studied Liam. He was either telling the truth, or he was a damn good liar.

  Cam wouldn’t discount that last possibility.

  “If I can get to where I’m going, I can make arrangements,” Cam said. “But I’ll expect my money back when this is done.”

  Liam hesitated briefly before saying, “That might not be possible.”

  “Fuck. You’re telling me you want me to hand over eighteen thousand gold ten-dollars with no expectation that I’ll ever see it again to get something you don’t even know is genuine?”

  Liam’s steady look was the only reply Cam needed.

  “Fuck,” he said again.

  “Like I said, you owe me.”

  Cam clenched his teeth together and rolled his shoulders again. He hadn’t been able to stand still since being released from that chair, despite several violent objections from Marlon. Cammy hadn’t objected vocally, but the look in her eye had warned him that she wasn’t done making him pay for the punch to her face.

  “Now,” Liam said, lowering his voice further still, “I want the real story about Chris and that wolf. Chris was in charge around here, and he might have been a little messed up in the head, but most of these guys respected him and they aren’t happy he’s dead.”

  Cam shook his head. “Forget it.”

  Liam glanced over his shoulder. Eli shook his head. Liam returned his gaze to Cam at about the same time as Cam returned his gaze to Liam. “If it fucks up anything I’m working on, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

  “That’s fine by me.” Cam pushed away from the washroom counter. “You tell them whatever you need to tell them, but I need to leave.”

  “I want collateral for those gold ten-dollars.” Liam eyed Cam from head to toe and settled on Cam’s face.

  Cam’s stomach tightened again. He knew where this was going.

  “If you think—”

  “Uh, huh,” Liam said.

  Cam heard the whish of a gun sliding out of a holster and glimpsed Eli pulling his arm around from behind him. He didn’t raise the gun toward Cam, but just knowing it was there was enough.

  “Son of a bitch.” Cam glared at Liam for a few seconds and then reached for his right eye. “I’ll fucking kill you if I don’t get this back.”

  He was going to find out how Liam and Eli knew so much
about him, and then he was going to hurt somebody for sharing information that shouldn’t have been shared.

  “It might not be much consolation, but I promise I won’t let anything happen to it. You have my word.”

  Cam slowly and carefully removed the implant that allowed him to see in his right eye. His left eye had always been dominant and although the implants allowed his eyes to work together, he would need the implant in his dominant eye or he’d risk being as blind with it as he was without.

  “That’s more disgusting than I expected,” Liam said, his voice not quite solid sounding.

  Cam worked his implant the rest of the way out. He encountered more resistance than he was used to but he had to set aside his concern for the moment. The spiked end came free with a wet sucking sound.

  “I really wish I didn’t feel this was necessary, Lujan, but your reputation—”

  “I get things done.”

  “Can’t deny that,” Liam said. He opened a cabinet next to him and dug around. “Here.” He extended a threadbare washcloth toward Cam.

  Cam stared at the washcloth, very aware of the fact that he’d just killed his depth perception, half his peripheral vision, and opened his eye up to possible infection if he didn’t get one of his backup implants inserted within a reasonable amount of time. “Are you fucking kidding me? This is worth a quarter of a million gold ten-dollars and you expect me to drop it onto a washrag? Get a damn box.”

  “Sorry. I don’t have a box.”

  Cam started to reinsert the implant.

  “I have something that will work well enough,” Eli said, pulling something out of his back pocket. Cam lowered his arm. It’d been a bluff anyway. He would never be able to successfully reinsert the implant without the proper supplies.

  Liam reached across the small space and accepted what looked like a spare magazine for Eli’s gun. He flicked his thumb across a spot on the magazine and it opened. Inside there were several full needles, two pinkie-sized vials of a clear liquid, and a phone so small it would have been dwarfed by the palm of Cam’s hand.

  Cam looked up from the small container, catching Eli’s gaze with the eye that still worked.

  “Take one of the needles with you,” Eli said, his deep voice strangely soft. “Heat season has started.”

  “Repression drug or poison?” Cam asked. He might not want to end up mated to any random wolf that came along, but he wasn’t willing to kill one for no good reason.

  “A little of both. It’ll take one down, but it won’t kill. You’ll have about three minutes to get ahead if you have to use it.”

  Cam dropped the implant into the small container, took out one of the needles, and tucked it into his pocket.

  His eye felt naked, empty, and he kept blinking as he tried to get used to the feeling of being without his implant.

  “I didn’t realize your eye would look so . . . normal,” Liam said.

  Cam focused on Liam. “What do you mean?”

  “Your eyeball. It doesn’t look all that weird.”

  “You’re a dick, you know that?”

  A startled look flashed across Liam’s face. Then he grinned. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  Cam finally got around to asking the question he’d been wanting to ask since the moment he’d been released from that chair, one he’d held off asking because he still wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer. “About the wolf, is he dead?”

  Eli moved to tuck his gun away. “Liam.”

  Liam winced. “I don’t know. I had Luca and John move him to the cellar so we could figure out what to do with him. I’m pretty sure they rolled him down the stairs. He would’ve killed all of us if they hadn’t taken him down.”

  Cam stared hard at Liam.

  Liam raised his hands. “I didn’t fire a shot. I did convince them not to make a deliberate kill shot there at the end by promising we’d find a way to interrogate him if he made it through the night. But you know there was nothing I could do. He killed Chris.”

  “Chris was about to kill me. I wasn’t feeling a lot of sympathy for the guy at the time.”

  Liam rubbed his eyebrow. “Shit. Were you working with the wolf or something?”

  “Or something,” Cam said. His legs started to feel markedly fatigued and he eased back against the counter again. He’d been trying not to show how weak he was, but Eli’s gaze hadn’t missed the move.

  Cam still didn’t trust either Liam or Eli and he wasn’t going to give up more information than he had to to get what he needed. Maybe he’d turn out to be wrong—he’d been wrong plenty of times before—but his innate caution kept his mouth shut.

  “Okay then,” Liam said. “It’d probably be better if you left now, before anyone asks the wrong question—”

  “I’m taking the wolf with me.”

  Liam scowled. “There’s no way—”

  “There’s a way. I’ll find it. They’ll eventually kill him if he isn’t already dead. You know that.” Cam fought back against the voice telling him he was making a mistake, that the wolf—Rick—wasn’t his problem.

  Fuck that voice. There were a lot of problems that weren’t his and yet he tried to fix them anyway.

  “We need those gold ten-dollars as soon as you can get them to us. You won’t have time—”

  “Don’t try telling me what to do. I’ll get the gold ten-dollars to you by tomorrow night. You’d just better find a way to make sure my implant gets back to me just as quickly.”

  “I gave my word.”

  Eli met Cam’s gaze over Liam’s shoulder. “Liam’ll do what he says.”

  “Liam’s a fucking spy and if he knows what he’s doing, his word means about as much as mine does when it comes to people he doesn’t trust.”

  Liam huffed. “I’ve heard enough about you to trust you when it comes to something like this.”

  “I’ve never heard of you.” The implication being clear enough as far as Cam was concerned.

  “Yeah.” Liam grinned again. “That’s why I wanted collateral.”

  Chapter 9

  Cam let his breath out in a slow exhale and carefully squatted next to Rick. He couldn’t in good conscious keep thinking of him as just “the wolf” and even though the name “Rick” still didn’t sit well with him, he knew it was time to get over it.

  Rick’s head had a gash in it the width of Cam’s hand. That gash wasn’t the only injury that accounted for Rick’s current state of unconsciousness. Cam counted at least ten bullet holes in Rick’s body, and he was sure he’d missed counting at least a few more.

  For a moment he thought Rick was dead. A surge of anger and disgust blindsided him.

  Rick didn’t appear to be breathing, and his pulse was impossible to find. Cam finally resorted to putting his mouth over Rick’s and biting down on Rick’s bottom lip.

  He tasted the sharp, dark tang of alien blood, and then sat back in the glow of the flashlight Liam had supplied him with and waited.

  Only seconds later, the blood clotted.

  Rick was healing.

  Almost as unexpected as the anger, relief surged through him in a white-hot rush. Cam raised a shaking hand to his forehead and pushed his hair back. He had about half an hour to figure out how to get Rick out of here or he was going to have to leave him behind, because that was as long as Liam believed he could keep the others occupied.

  Cam started his search right away. Now that he was out of immediate danger, a bone-deep fatigue had started to catch up with him.

  He hit pay dirt on the third shelf from the back of the cellar. A stack of folding litters, and all four of them appeared complete and functional. He dragged it off the shelf, dropped it to the floor, and started opening the pieces.

  He set it up beside Rick, took a deep breath, and then hauled Rick over onto the rip-proof fabric that stretched across the frame.

  Rick was heavier than he looked. Most wolves were. Henry certainly had been.

  Cam strapped Rick to the litter. He thought abo
ut how long it was probably going to take him to drag Rick through the woods and he decided at the last moment to tuck one of the remaining blankets under Rick’s knees.

  He spent almost all the time he had dragging Rick up the stairs. The litter had a hard bottom that stretched along the spine of the litter and that made things easier than they might have been otherwise, but Cam’s muscles had had just about as much as they could take. The moment he dragged Rick off the stairs and through the cellar door, he collapsed on the ground and stared up at the bright afternoon sun and wheezed like he’d just finished the last leg of the obstacle course that had nearly kicked his ass when he was nineteen.

  He’d never done anything as physically trying as what he’d done then. Mentally—that was another story, but he could honestly say he was about to reach his physical limits if he didn’t get a chance to rest soon.

  Cam rolled over and trudged to his feet. He went back inside and gathered the only essential supplies he intended to carry with him—water and a small bottle of lube he’d taken from the bathroom inside the house just before he’d left, and then he climbed the cellar steps one last time.

  After that, he started pulling Rick toward the woods, following the path beside the house that Liam had told him to stick to until he got beyond the kitchen windows. The litter bumped along the scrubby grass and turned over a few small rocks but otherwise moved along quietly.

  Cam stared toward the house and kissed his beloved multi-tool goodbye. It was somewhere inside, probably, in whatever room Rick had put him in the night before—assuming it had only been one day.

  Shit. He really should have confirmed that. He could only blame his lack of foresight on how hard he was working to stay upright and coherent.

  “I’m going to expect some kind of reward after this shit,” Cam said under his breath.